Saturday, March 31, 2007

What's the place of feminism in the media?

Cambridge, MA -- At the WAM! conference, women are discussing the role of minority and gender-based publications versus more "mainstream" policy-oriented publications. Both consider themselves as writing from a feminist or anti-patriarchal perspective, but they often compete for the same funding or find frustrations in the narrowness the coverage they see in each others' publications. What I've noticed is that the people of color see the media through an entirely different lens than the policy wonks see it.

My instinct is that more collaboration between these two different kinds of outlets would be mutually beneficial, but it's hard to get the two kinds of approaches to connect in a meaningful way. The nature of the business is both collaborative and competitive. I don't know what the answer to this is, but it seems like there should be more cross-pollination between the two outlets. Links are an easy and free way to do this, but more time- and cost-intensive ways are also useful.